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July 27, 2001
How is it that America
How is it that America is either unilateralist or isolationist, but hardly ever multilateralist?
The list speaks for itself:
- This week, the United States refused to sign a protocol ensuring adherence to a ban on biological weapons, claiming that the protocol made them risk "industrial espionage". This from a country that has maintained brutal sanctions on Iraq for ten years, causing the deaths of 50,000 children a year from hunger and disease, for the ostensible reason---of refusing to allow international inspectors to search for biological weapons! America is refusing to submit to the very same inspection procedures it is bombing and starving Iraq for refusing to accept! The sheer hypocrisy boggles the mind.
- Last week, America refused to join a treaty restricting the international trade in small arms. Despite the fact, evident to anyone with a brain, that the purpose of the treaty was to combat the smuggling of arms into poor countries' civil wars, the US embarrassed itself by bringing up its bizarre "constitutional right to bear arms" claim. The American gun lobby, mostly the product of sport shooters, hunters, and the like, doesn't have the slightest inkling of the suffering caused in countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone, where the gun trade plies its deadly product to drug-crazed teenagers who go on to commit wanton massacres. Or in Sri Lanka, where an 18-year war drags on and on thanks to discreet supplies of small arms from around the world.
- In 1972 the USA and USSR signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. There was a very good reason for this. If a nuclear power is not itself threatened with any kind of retaliatory nuclear strike, it becomes invincible. It can then blackmail, bully, and humiliate other countries with virtual impunity using its nuclear weapons as a threat. Instead of becoming the deterrent, defensive weapon they were for most of the Cold War, nukes become an offensive weapon of unimaginable barbarity. There is one and only one reason for the United States to build a missile shield - the raw, naked, hunger for power. America wants to remain the world's only superpower forever, if it can possibly help it, regardless of any sense of fairness or justice. In its own way, it is every bit as pernicious as old-style imperialism.
- Economic conservatives around the world have long tried to minimize or deny the growing body of evidence supporting the fact that the earth's temperature is increasing, that the chief cause is carbon dioxide emissions from industries and vehicles, and that swift and painful action must be taken. In most other Western countries the democratic will of the people, generally pro-environmental, is able to restrain this kind of industrialist short-sightedness. Not so in the United States, especially one with a president with close ties to the oil industry. The internal combustion engine and the technology based upon it have been the foundation of the industrialized economy for over a century. To admit the need for a replacement is, in effect, to admit the need for the end of the old industrial order and the beginning of a truly different kind of economy. Yet just as the French aristocrats insisted on keeping their lands until their heads fell off the tumbrils, so too do American consumers and businesses hide in the sand from the consequences of their actions.
- When mass murders and massacres rise, national sovereignty is a poor defense indeed. No one, no matter what their domestic law or practice, has the moral right to kill thousands of innocent civilians. Government officials who push such savage policies fully deserve to be arrested and tried for their crimes, and we should not hesitate to use international courts for this if domestic courts are unwilling or unavailable. The United States is no stranger to this practice; it supplied many of the judges and facilities for the trials of German and Japanese war criminals after World War II. Why does it balk now at the idea of an International Criminal Court? Because, of course, many of the despots who would face such trials are former friends and allies of the U.S., including such figures as Augusto Pinochet of Chile, and Suharto of Indonesia. Indeed, there are more than a few American officials who have aided and abetted war crimes in Vietnam, Chile, Angola, Namibia, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Heaven forbid that Henry Kissinger and his ilk might actually be held responsible for the bombs they rained and the guns they sold to dictators.
- In 1999, the U.S. Senate rejected, by an incomprehensible 95-0 vote, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. Once again, this is not about defense; it is about offense. The basic horrific destructiveness of nuclear weapons hardly needs testing; the delivery systems and propulsion of specific weapons deployment are routinely tested now by computer simulations. To be fair, the United States has not actually conducted a nuclear test in nine years. Why scuttle the treaty then? Because of the hidden reason. Nuclear tests are not performed in order to make sure your weapons work; they are there to remind enemies, real and imagined, that America has nuclear power that it will use for whatever reason it sees fit, keeping only its own interests in mind and not those of the rest of the world. The result of this kind of sabre-rattling, of course, is that other countries rush to develop nuclear weapons. Israel was the first to join the Big Five; recently India and Pakistan, who have already fought three wars in the past fifty years, are aiming the deadly barrage at each other.
- One of the cruelest and most heartrending weapons of war is the land mine. Laid indiscriminately across a wide area, the mines often remain for years or even decades after the war in question ends. Countries like Vietnam and Afghanistan have hundreds of thousands of mines in their territory, which kill and maim thousands of people every year, nearly all civilian. Children have their arms blown off, pregnant women have their wombs ripped open by the sudden blasts, farmers see their crops destroyed, and the countryside remains a forbidding terror for many endless years. Yet, apparently, the military needs to have this sick weapon at its disposal, even if virtually every other country in the world has agreed to give them up.
In this respect, the Bush administration differs only in degree from its Democratic predecessor, which also dragged its feet on the land-mine treaty and the nuclear test-ban. The American public is only marginally interested in these issues, which play a scant role in elections and receive ridiculously distorted coverage in the American press. And so on America goes, secure in the arrogance of its imperialism and self-righteous with the pomposity of the powerful.
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Posted by Tyrone at July 27, 2001 12:33 AM